Ridgewood ceremony honors families of those killed in military service
SEPTEMBER 28, 2014, 9:38 PM LAST UPDATED: SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2014, 9:45 PM BY JOHN C. ENSSLIN STAFF WRITER THE RECORD
Sometimes people – well-meaning people trying to skirt a painful topic – will avoid talking to Robin Griffin about her son Kyle, who died in May 2003 while serving as a 20-year-old soldier in Iraq.
Griffin, an Emerson resident, wishes people would not do that.
“Not mentioning him is more upsetting,” Griffin said recently.
That’s why she and her husband, Ron, said yes when asked to take part in a ceremony in Ridgewood on Sunday night honoring Gold Star mothers and the other relatives of soldiers killed in action.
“It’s amazing that people would turn out to do something like this,” she said prior to the ceremony in Van Neste Park.
About 140 people attended the service held just after sunset in the park, where luminarias — twinkling candles in small bags decorated with stars — lined the walkways. A soldier’s helmet and pair of boots rested near a rifle stuck into the ground.
One of the speakers at the ceremony, Dave Feeney, a local funeral director, talked about the distinction between Gold Star mothers who had lost a child and Blue Star mothers who have children in active military service or have served.
North Jersey parents vow to ban alcohol at home parties
SEPTEMBER 28, 2014 LAST UPDATED: SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2014, 1:21 AM BY DEENA YELLIN STAFF WRITER THE RECORD
Schools around North Jersey are wielding a new weapon in the fight against teen drug and alcohol use: the parents’ pledge.
Dubbed the Safe Homes Pledge, it’s part of a nationwide movement that asks parents to sign an agreement committing themselves to providing adult supervision for parties in their homes, securing prescription medication, and not serving alcohol to any guest under the age of 21.
Among the North Jersey towns and school districts where parents have participated are Ramsey, Ridgewood, Ramapo Indian Hills Regional High School District, Northern Highlands Regional High School, Pascack Hills, Ringwood, Wayne and Wanaque. The names of parents who have signed the agreement are then listed in a local directory.
Now, parents in the Northern Valley Regional School District are being asked to take the pledge.
The initiative is the latest step in a wide-ranging campaign by the Northern Valley community to fight alcohol and drug use.
Knights of Columbus Annual Stickball Tournament September 28,2014 Richard Hrvatin
Ridgewood NJ,The Ridgewood Knights of Columbus Council #1736 held their annual stickball tournament, now in its fifth year, on Saturday September 27th on Passaic Street in Ridgewood. First place went to Chris Eidschun, Paul Brennan, Doug Christopher, and Brian Peacock of the Ridgewood Fire Department. This year’s event was held in honor of one of Ridgewood’s Bravest, Fireman Steven Lawrence Missel and his Family. Proceeds from the event will go toward the children’s college fund.
“Since the inaugural event in 2010, this has grown every year”, said event coordinator Tony Lupo. “The Knights are pleased to be able to help out the Missel family.”
The Ridgewood Knights are celebrating their 100-year anniversary, and the stickball tournament kicked off the start of the fraternal year.
Maintaining a safe community requires effort from all stakeholders
Maintaining a safe community requires effort from all stakeholders. Dedicated police professionals working in collaboration with vigilant and engaged citizens can truly make a significant difference in the overall safety and security of a community. We are fortunate to have both in our community. I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the hard work of our law enforcement professionals our citizens for helping to keep our community safe.
While the current trends are positive, we must continue to take proactive steps to make our community less attractive to criminals. Each of us can take steps to ensure that individually we are less vulnerable to criminal activity as well as looking out for our neighbors. On our end the department will continue our proactive efforts to keep the community safe. We have several trained crime prevention officers ready to provide information and assistance to any resident and/or business owner wishing information on better securing their persons and/or property.
Geneva Report warns record debt and slow growth point to crisis
By Chris Giles, Economics Editor
A “poisonous combination” of record debt and slowing growth suggest the global economy could be heading for another crisis, a hard-hitting report will warn on Monday.
The 16th annual Geneva Report, commissioned by the International Centre for Monetary and Banking Studies and written by a panel of senior economists including three former senior central bankers, predicts interest rates across the world will have to stay low for a “very, very long” time to enable households, companies and governments to service their debts and avoid another crash.
The warning, before the International Monetary Fund’s annual meeting in Washington next week, comes amid growing concern that a weakening global recovery is coinciding with the possibility that the US Federal Reserve will begin to raise interest rates within a year.
Barack Obama’s first speech to the UN was filled with the giddy hopes that won him the presidency in the first place. “More than at any point in human history, the interests of nations and peoples are shared,” he told world leaders in 2009.
Five years later, it was a greyer and more sombre Mr Obama who warned the UN this week about the “generational task” of defeating Islamist militants in the Middle East, two days after he launched his first air strikes in Syria. “The only language understood by killers like this is the language of force,” he said.
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Replete with George W Bush-style rhetoric about a “network of death” and “this brand of evil”, Mr Obama’s speech this week was an effort to reboot his flagging presidency.
In political terms, the more martial Mr Obama was trying to shake of the Jimmy Carter aura that has been hanging over his White House; the steady corrosion of leverage at home and influence abroad in the face of Middle East turmoil that slowly leaves an incumbent looking impotent.
Bernadette Walsh campaigning with Congressmen Scott Garrett
Freeholder candidate has roots that run deep in Bergen County
SEPTEMBER 28, 2014, 3:20 PM LAST UPDATED: SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2014, 3:34 PM BY JOHN C. ENSSLIN STAFF WRITER THE RECORD
To understand Bernadette Walsh, one of two Republican candidates for Bergen County freeholder, it helps to know the story of the “bamboo man.”
That’s the nickname her late father, James Coghlan, picked up in the 1960s when he and his wife, Mary, cultivated bamboo as part of their greenhouse nursery business in Upper Saddle River.
They grew and sold bamboo to people like the philanthropist Doris Duke and to places like the now defunct Jungle Habitat in West Milford and the Polynesian exhibition at the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing Queens.
James Coghlan wrote a book in 1965 called “The Story of Bamboo.” The couple even made an appearance on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson.
Walsh was a small child when her parents closed the nursery to instead run a real estate and appraisal business near the train station in Ramsey for 25 years.
But their daughter recalled that time while talking about what she considers her proudest accomplishment in her four years as a Ridgewood councilwoman.
The self-described “tree hugger” helped revive the borough’s Shade Tree Commission, which had been dormant for many years. After Hurricanes Irene and Sandy toppled about 500 trees in town, Walsh said, people felt a need to be planting trees again.
Eric Holder’s Rap Sheet
September 26, 2014 10:30 AM
By The Editors
Eric Holder’s legal mercies have typically been reserved for Clinton donors and unrepentant terrorists, but his decision yesterday to step down as attorney general of the United States after nearly six years is an act of mercy toward the American public.
In an administration characterized by outsized misadventures — from the use of the nation’s tax bureau to suppress political opponents to the use of secret waiting lists at government hospitals that killed American servicemen — Eric Holder managed to make his Justice Department a source of special, nay, historic attention: In June 2012, Holder became the first U.S. attorney general to be held in contempt by the House of Representatives. He earned every vote.
Achieving “justice” via the Justice Department may be an intrinsically unlikely prospect, but none of Holder’s recent predecessors — Janet Reno, John Ashcroft, Michael Mukasey, even the much-maligned Alberto Gonzales — exhibited his sheer contempt for the rule of law. Much to his preference was employing the law for political purposes; or, when necessary, dispensing with the law completely.
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The latter was largely Holder’s policy as chief legal counsel to the president. The duty of the attorney general has historically been to advise against unconstitutional or illegal activity; Holder instead regularly aided and abetted it. When the president unilaterally delayed deportations for a select group of illegal immigrants, Holder concocted specious legal rationales to justify it. Regular slap-downs from the Supreme Court — on the president’s unconstitutional NLRB appointees, on his contraception mandate, on his unconstitutional effort to control ministerial hiring — have proven Holder’s legal work insupportable.
Nowhere was Holder’s rank partisanship more clearly on display than on issues of race: for instance, his refusal to prosecute the New Black Panther Party for voter intimidation — despite video evidence of truncheon-wielding men warding voters away from a Philadelphia polling station in November 2008. Those whose political expression was inhibited in Philadelphia were not, Holder later suggested to the House Oversight Committee, “my people” — and thus apparently did not deserve the protection of the law. This from the lips of the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer. Meanwhile, Holder dismissed his critics as racists, eager to destroy him and the president because “we’re both African American.” This same “nation of cowards” was, by Holder’s reckoning, responsible for the voter-identification laws that his Justice Department has worked stridently — and largely unsuccessfully — to suppress in North Carolina, Wisconsin, and elsewhere.
Millennial« Generation Wuss »
by Bret Easton Ellis
In his books, he used to shoot at the materialistic excesses of his generation. But today, youth has become Bret Easton Ellis’ favorite target. According to him, young people are just too sensitive, too narcissistic ,too stupid. But ultimately, as he explains in this exclusive text, he kind of feel sorry for them ( and they love it !).
In February I gave an interview to Vice UK to help promote a film I had written and financed called The Canyons—I did the press because there was still the idea, the hope, that if myself or the director Paul Schrader talked about the film it would somehow find an audience interested in it and understand what it was: an experimental, guerilla DIY affair that cost $150,000 dollars to shoot ($90,000 out of our own pockets) and that we filmed over twenty days in L.A. during the summer of 2012 starring controversial Millennials Lindsay Lohan and porn star James Deen. The young journalist from Vice UK asked me about the usual things I was preoccupied with in that moment: my admiration of Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street—the best film I saw in 2013 (not great Scorsese, but better than any other American film that year) and we talked about the movie I’m writing for Kanye West, my love of Terrence Malick (though not To The Wonder), a miniseries I was developing about the Manson murders for FOX (but because of another Manson series going into production at NBC the miniseries has now been cancelled), the Bret Easton Ellis Podcast (link), the possibility of a new novel I had begun in January of 2013 and that I lost interest in but hoped to get back to; we talked about my problems with David Foster Wallace, my love of Joan Didion, as well as Empire versus post-Empire (link) and we talked about, of course, The Canyons. But the first question the young journalist asked me wasn’t about the movie—it was about why I was always referring to Millennials as Generation Wuss on my Twitter feed. And I answered her honestly, unprepared for the level of noise my comments caused once the Vice UK piece was posted.
New York scientists unveil ‘invisibility cloak’ to rival Harry Potter’s
By Caurie Putnam
ROCHESTER N.Y. (Reuters) – Watch out Harry Potter, you are not the only wizard with an invisibility cloak.
Scientists at the University of Rochester have discovered a way to hide large objects from sight using inexpensive and readily available lenses, a technology that seems to have sprung from the pages of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter fantasy series.
Cloaking is the process by which an object becomes hidden from view, while everything else around the cloaked object appears undisturbed.
“A lot of people have worked on a lot of different aspects of optical cloaking for years,” John Howell, a professor of physics at the upstate New York school, said on Friday.
The so-called Rochester Cloak is not really a tangible cloak at all. Rather the device looks like equipment used by an optometrist. When an object is placed behind the layered lenses it seems to disappear.
The Khorosan Group Does Not Exist
It’s a fictitious name the Obama administration invented to deceive us.
September 27, 2014 4:00 AM
By Andrew C. McCarthy
We’re being had. Again.
For six years, President Obama has endeavored to will the country into accepting two pillars of his alternative national-security reality. First, he claims to have dealt decisively with the terrorist threat, rendering it a disparate series of ragtag jayvees. Second, he asserts that the threat is unrelated to Islam, which is innately peaceful, moderate, and opposed to the wanton “violent extremists” who purport to act in its name.
Now, the president has been compelled to act against a jihad that has neither ended nor been “decimated.” The jihad, in fact, has inevitably intensified under his counterfactual worldview, which holds that empowering Islamic supremacists is the path to security and stability. Yet even as war intensifies in Iraq and Syria — even as jihadists continue advancing, continue killing and capturing hapless opposition forces on the ground despite Obama’s futile air raids — the president won’t let go of the charade.
Reader says The problem is the inadequate security and accountability provided around the collected money and the unwillingness to FULLY PROSECUTE and FULLY RECOVER the money
If it aint broke – don’t fix it.
As to using the theft as a justification for implementing new meters – it is not the METERS fault that there was theft – it was the criminals fault – and if you “blame” the cash for “causing” the theft – then do you also blame the woman for her clothing or actions for “causing” the rape?
The problem is NOT the coin meters. The problem is the inadequate security and accountability provided around the collected money and the unwillingness to FULLY PROSECUTE and FULLY RECOVER the money.
But lets not address the REAL issue – lets implement new meters so we can waste more taxpayer money and line the pockets of a “friend” vendor and provide another data collection point to track citizens and then allow the coin money (and personal data) to be electronically stolen by overseas thieves.
UPDATE: Sidewalk Café “Encroachments” September 30th 2014 Boyd A. Loving
Ridgewood NJ, It is rumored that Village Manager Roberta Sonenfeld recently completed her first physical review of all sidewalk cafe layouts (with a tape measure at the ready). Reportedly, several cafes were found to have exceeded the permitted square footage and were advised to make adjustments/modifications accordingly. A copy of the memo/report detailing the Village Manager’s findings was requested via the Open Public Records Act (OPRA). However, a reply to the OPRA request was received indicating that no such written memo/report existed.
One prominent restaurateur revealed to me that as many as five (5) establishments were found by the Village Manager to have been operating sidewalk cafes without the required permits. Further investigation reportedly revealed that all of the establishments had all submitted applications to the Village, some dating back over 18 months ago, but none had received their permits (nor any rejections). No explanation was offered to those establishments as to the cause for such lengthy delays in the Village’s permitting process, nor for the absence of any feedback regarding the status of the applications themselves.
While some elected officials continue to cite the lack of parking as the main issue affecting those trying to establish businesses in the downtown Ridgewood, the inordinately long waits associated with necessary permits, accompanied by the seeming indifference of those responsible (surprise, surprise), may actually be what is keeping new businesses away.
Christians in Middle East face growing threat, top cleric says
SEPTEMBER 27, 2014 LAST UPDATED: SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2014, 12:35 AM BY HANNAN ADELY STAFF WRITER THE RECORD
The patriarch of the Syriac Orthodox Church, a cleric who formerly lived in Teaneck, recalled his visit recently to the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, where thousands of Christians have fled for their lives. A young boy in a crowded church threw up his arms and said to the patriarch: “We have no place. We have no space.”
He meant a real, physical place for Christians like him and his family, who were expelled from ancient Christian towns in Syria and Iraq. But Patriarch Mor Ignatius Aphrem II said he also understood his words to mean a place in the culture, religion and life of the Middle East.
“Their existence is threatened,” Aphrem said during an interview last week at St. Mark’s Cathedral in Teaneck, where he served for 18 years until his election as Antiochan patriarch last spring. “This has been their home for 2,000 years, and thousands of years before that they were indigenous to the area. There’s a real threat that they’ll be driven out of the Middle East and there won’t be Christians anymore in the area where Christ was born.”
